Copjec Antigone-ImagineThere'SNoWoman 03

1
`e Tomb of
Perseverance:
On Antigone
12 13
chapter 1
[Athenian] tragedy is contemporary with the City [Athens] and with its
legal system. . . . [W]hat tragedy is talking about is itself and the problems of law it is encountering. What is talking and what is talked about is
the audience on the benches, but rst of all it is the City . . . which puts
itself on the stage and plays itself. . . . Not only does the tragedy enact
itself on stage . . . it enacts its own problematics. It puts in question its
own internal contradictions, revealing . . . that the true subject matter
of tragedy is social thought . . . in the very process of elaboration. 2
That is, not only did the Athenians insert themselves into their tragic dramasas
Chorus members, who judged the actions of the protagonists in the same way as
the tribunal of citizens in the audience was judging the unfolding tragedy against
others performed for the same contestthey also posed, through their tragedies,
the juridical and ethical questions they were currently confronting in actuality.
But if the form of Athenian tragedy is so local, tied not only to a specic
place, a particular and precisely datable time, and a unique set of social problems,
it would seem, then, according to the historicist-relativist thinking of our day, to
offer nothing that might help us think through the juridical and ethical issues
raised by the modern city. In fact, to begin a consideration of contemporary urban issues with a reference to Athenian tragedy is automatically to brand oneself
the tomb of perseverance: on antigone
Greek tragedy is the term we commonly use to refer to it, but it would be more accurate to say Attic or Athenian tragedy, since it was only in the city-state of Athens that
this aesthetic form was nourished and thrived. Yet not even this correction sufciently discloses the intimate relation that bound this particular city to this particular form, for tragedy was not simply founded in Athens (between 534 and
530 b.c.) and there declared dead (by Aristotle, in 414 b.c.), it also helped invent the very city that invented it.1 As Jean-Pierre Vernant has argued:
with the sin of anachronism. I propose, however, that the question should not always be How can we rid ourselves of anachronism?for it is sometimes more
relevant to ask What is the signicance of anachronism? How can we account
for the temporal nomadism of gures from the past? And, in this context, how is
it possible that the drama of Antigone still concerns us? 3
The simplest initial response would be to point out that German Idealism resurrected Antigone at the beginning of our own era and refashioned her as the
paradigmatic gure of modern ethics. Hegel, Schelling, Hlderlin all wrote with
deep fascination about this young Athenian woman, and it is their fascination that
commands contemporary interest in her.4 Voicing, undoubtedly, the sentiments
of his colleagues in addition to his own, Hegel proclaimed Antigone one of the
most sublime, and in every respect most consummate works of human effort ever
brought forth.5 Despite this transhistorical judgment, however, before the intervention of German Idealism, the play had not received any special attention
and had, in fact, been relatively neglected. It was only after paeans such as Hegels
began to revive the play that it became a major reference point of ethical speculation, including that of Kierkegaard, Brecht, Anouilh, Irigaray, Derrida, and, of
course, Lacan. In 1978 Germany in Autumn, a compilation lm produced by nine
New German Cinema directors, was released. Focusing on questions of a familys
right to bury its dead and the right of citizens to rebel against their government,
the lm loosely associated actions taken by the Red Army Faction and the BaaderMeinhof terrorists against the German state with Antigone and Polynices rebellion against Creon and the city-state of Thebes. More recently, Jean-Marie
Straub and Danile Huillets 1992 release of their lm version of Brechts adaptation of Holderlins translation of Sophocles Antigone has demonstrated that the
legacy of German Idealisms retrieval of Antigone lives on. If our interest in her
is an archaism, then it is a peculiarly modern one. What will concern me in the
following analysis is less the historical conditions that reawakened interest in
Antigone (the Hellenistic bent of German Idealism has been amply explored) than
the plays own susceptibility to a rereading in the modern context (how is it possible to resurrect such an old drama?); for this issue is closely linked to the ethical issues raised in the play.
My approach to these issues begins with a single rereading of Antigone, or,
more accurately, a rereading of a prior rereading: Lacan, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, reinterprets Sophocles play by challenging Hegels interpretation in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Although later, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel would read the play
14 15
chapter 1
straightforwardly as a modern drama of ethical action, in the Phenomenology he

reads it as a tragedy belonging to an earlier moment that he describes (perhaps
metaphorically) as that of the Greek city-state; at this moment the opposition between the universal and the particular, the state and the family, human and divine
law, man and woman could not be practically overcome. Hegel argues that classical Greek society held the two poles of these oppositions together, in a precarious equilibrium, through custom, which provided the community with a concrete
unity. But when any decisive action was taken, this equilibrium collapsed into real
and irresolvable conict. Through the ethical act, the ethical community was dissolved, for the act initiates the division of itself into itself as the active principle
and into the reality over against it, a reality which, for it, is negative. By the deed,
therefore, it becomes guilt. . . . And the guilt also acquires the meaning of crime,
for as simple, ethical consciousness, it has turned towards one law, but turned its
back on the other and violates the latter by its deed. 6 Only inaction, then, can remain innocent in the Greek polis; every act, insofar as it decisively chooses one
pole of the opposition, one law, over the other, renders the actor guilty. This inevitable and tragic result is, according to Hegel, the very point of these dramas in
general and of Antigone in particular, for there each protagonist, each ethical consciousness sees right only on one side and wrong on the other, that consciousness which belongs to the divine law sees in the other side only the violence of
human caprice, while that which holds to human law sees in the other only
the self-will and disobedience of the individual who insists on being his own
authority (para. 466).
Hegel here effectively argues that Antigone (that consciousness which
belongs to the divine law) and Creon (that which holds to human law) are, in
their very decisiveness and intransigence, both guilty, both in the wrong, insofar as
they both abandon or alienate one principle through the very act of embracing its
opposite. Acting on behalf of a particular individual, her brother, Antigone betrays the community and terrorizes the state, while Creon acts on behalf of the
city-state and thus sacrices Polynices and the values of the family.
Lacan attacks the deep undecidability of this reading in order decisively
to side with Antigone, praising hers as the only real, ethical act in the play and
condemning the actions of Creon as crimes. In this reading it is only Creon who,
through his actions, renders himself guilty. This is not to say that Antigones implacability goes unnoticed by Lacan; he is as strict as Hegel is in observing the raw,
untamed, and uncompromising nature of Oedipuss daughters rebellion. The
nature of the girl is savage, like her fathers, and she does not know how to bend
before her troubles, is what the Chorus says of her, and Lacan is quick to agree.7
But as a psychoanalystand here we catch a glimpse of the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy or psychologyhe does not read the behavior of each
of the protagonists, he denes the structure through which their acts must be read.
Thus, although Antigone and Creon may be equally stubborn in the performance
of their duties, this stubborness, according to which fantasy structure it enters,
admits of a fundamental distinction that Lacan will use to ruin the symmetry
Hegel so carefully constructs.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud warns us not to conate Fixierarbeit, which is an inexplicable xation that persists despite every external attempt
to dislodge it, with Haftbarkeit, which is perhaps best translated by perseverance
but has a curious resonance in German, since it means also responsibility, commitment8 It is this distinction introduced by Freud that lies behind and undergirds Lacans insistence that Antigone, and she alone, is the heroine of Sophocles
play; her perseverance in carrying out the burial of her brother is ethically different
from Creons xation on enforcing the statist prohibition against his burial.
How Freud is able to distinguish between these two kinds of act is what
we will have to determine, but Lacan gives us a clue when he refers to them as
separate effects of the individual libidinal adventure (SVII: 88). Whatever else
needs to be said about the distinction, it is clear from this that it cannot be drawn
without taking into account the sexual being of the subject who acts. The reason
Hegels reading has received so much feminist attention is precisely because it
seems to be attentive to this issue insofar as it foregrounds the sexual difference
that separates the plays main protagonists. But this difference turns out to be,
in his reading, only a gender or biological difference, not a sexual one; that is,
Antigone and Creon enact a division of labor that is dened sociologically, according to the spaces they are allowed to inhabit and the roles they are encouraged
to assume, given their biology. In fact, Hegel consciously aims to avoid sex as far as
possible, which is why he chooses to focus not on the husband/wife, but on the
brother/sister relation. This relation, he says, provides a truer or unmixed picture of the difference between the sexes insofar as it excludes sexual desire. This
positing of a family relation free of libido is problematic to begin withboth
Freud and Foucault, in different and denitive ways, have exposed the family as a
hotbed of desiring relationsbut it is absolutely stupefying in light of the fact that
the family in question here is Oedipuss and no stranger, then, to the taint of in-
16 17
chapter 1
cest. The Greek text, which loads Antigones references to her brother with libidinal overtones, never lets us forget the fact that the tragedy that plays itself out before our eyes is in some sense a consequence of the incestuous union between
Oedipus and his mother. It is necessary to conclude, then, that there is in this section of The Phenomenology no sex and no sexual difference, properly speaking. This
has the effect of leaving the notions of work and act undisturbed or unproblematized by sexual enjoyment.
According to Freud, however, between sex or libidinal satisfaction and
work there is a permanent antagonism that threatens work (or the act) with extinction. As he notes in Civilization and Its Discontents, No other technique for the conduct
of work attaches the individual so rmly to reality as laying emphasis on work . . .
[which is] indispensible to the preservation and justication of existence in society. . . . And yet . . . work is not prized by men. They do not strive after it as they
do after other possibilities of satisfaction.9 By rethinking the notion of work
through that of pleasure, Freud opens Aristotles distinction between the act, in
all its rarity, and mere action to a redenition in which what matters is the kind of
relation each maintains toward sexual enjoyment. If the avowed ambition of the
Ethics seminar is to remove the discussion of ethics from the starry sky and place
it where it belongs, in our bodies, and nowhere else, that is, if its ambition is to
dene an ethics of the embodied subject, then its crucial rst step is to foreground
the relation between work and the body as the site of pleasure, in order to distinguish the act of Antigone from the action of Creon on this ground.
Before embarking on an analysis of these relations, it will be useful to
take a look at Hegels reading from a different perspective, one that will eventually complicate the notion of pleasure. What makes Antigone and Creon equally
guilty, in Hegels eyes, is the fact that in choosing one course of action they
thereby lose something that is not merely expendable, but that sustains, or is the
necessary condition of, the very thing they choose. Antigone and Creon act on
behalf of the particular and the universal, respectively, but since there is no particular without the universal, and vice versa, each choice ends in a betrayal of that
in the name of which it is made. Thinking, of course, of Hegel, Lacan termed the
either/or structure of such choices the vel of alienation and cited the muggers
offer, Your money or your life, as illustration of its lose/lose possibilities.10
Once the choice is offered, youre done forno matter which alternative you
take. Between these terms, clearly the only real choice is life, but from the moment
of your decision, yours will be a life severely limited by the loss of your wealth.
Now, it would seem that the revolutionary slogan, Freedom or death,

offers a choice with the same alienating structure. If you choose freedom and
thereby invalidate the threat of death, you have no way of demonstrating your independence of the life situation, as Hegel argued in his essay on Natural Law;
that is, you have no way of demonstrating that your choice is free. So, in this case
the only real choice is death, since it alone proves that your choice has been freely
made. Yet once this decision is taken, you lose all freedom but the freedom to die.
This is what Hegel called the freedom of the slave.
If you attend closely, however, you will notice that the second or ethical
choice between freedom and death does not conform to the rst. The description
of the rst choice as a mugging is meant to underscore what is at stake here; it
suggests that this particular choice is a game played entirely in the Others court.
Stumbling into its preprogrammed scenario, you, its victim, might have been
anyone at all, and you must react, if you are rational, in a purely formal way, by
making an analytical judgment and surrendering your purse. Kants moral law,
Act in such a way that the maxim of your action may be accepted as a universal
maxim, would be sufcient to get you through this urban dilemma; it would prescribe the correct choice. But this only underscores the problem with this statement of the moral law: it still imagines a choice prescribed by law, however formal
it may be, and reduces the notion of the universal to that of the common (SVII: 77).
In this case, everyone must act in the same way, but must loses its ethical connotation, since it is now guided by, rather than independent of, external sanction.
In the second example, however, by choosing one does not automatically
lose what is not chosen, but instead wins some of it. Lacan attributes the difference
between the two examples to the appearance of death in the second. It is through
the introduction of the lethal factor, as he puts it, that the revolutionary choice
opens the possibility of an act about which it is improper to say that it sacrices
freedom, that it loses it to the structure of alienation. The choice of death gains
freedom. This point is utterly incomprehensible unless one assumes that the
death one opts for in the second example is not the same one that is avoided in the
rst. That is, at the point at which death intersects freedomwhich is to say, at
the point at which it intersects the subjectit ceases to be conceivable in literal or
biological terms. The authority for this observation is, again, Freud, who argued
that death is for the subject only an abstract concept, with a negative content.11
For this reason it does not enter psychoanalysis as such, but only in the form of
the death drive. We must assume, then, if we are speaking of the embodied rather
18 19
Let us focus our attention, nally, on the act of Antigone. What precisely does she
do? Hegels version is the following: she buries her brother, Polynices, in order
to elevate him to the status of imperishable individuality; she makes him a
member of the community which prevails over . . . the forces of particular material elements . . . which sought to . . . destroy him (para. 452). This is Lacans
version: Antigone chooses to be . . . the guardian of the criminal as such. . . .
[B]ecause the community refuses to [bury Polynices, she] is required . . . to
maintain that essential being which is the family At, and and that is the theme or
true axis on which the whole tragedy turns. Antigone perpetuates, eternalizes,
immortalizes that At (SVII: 283). The two versions may appear to be roughly
equivalent, but a striking difference (and one that will lead us to observe others)
occurs in Lacans introduction of a word that draws attention to a notion which
not only Hegel but the entire modern period is loath to look at too directly or
closely, a notion that has, since the Enlightenment, become more obscene even
than death; this is the notion of immortality. What does it mean to immortalize
At? In modern times, it is not only the Greek word at, but also immortalize that
strikes us as anachronistic.
Yet, although one might have expected the notion of immortality to
perish completely, to become a casualty of the Enlightenments secularization of
reason and its dissolution of the links to its past, the truth turns out to be more
IMMORTALITY IN THE MODERN AGE
chapter 1
than the abstract subject, that what is at issue in the intersection of freedom and
death is not biological death, but the death drive. It is to the latter that we owe the
possibility of an ethical act that does not alienate freedom or incur additional
guilt. More specically, it is to sublimation, which is strictly aligned with the drive as
such in Lacans account, that we owe this possibility.
My argument, in sum, is that Lacan attacks Hegels argument by (1) sexualizing work or, better, the act and (2) debiologizing death in an effort, in both
cases, to corporealize the ethical subject. I understand that this appears to give rise
to a contradiction: to declare ethical action, as such, a sublimation would seem
to purify action of all reference to the body and pleasure. But this apparent contradiction arises from a common yet faulty denition of sublimation. If one
were successfully to show that sublimation is not, in fact, what the foolish crowd
thinks . . . [it] doesnt necessarily make the sexual object disappearfar from it
(SVII: 161), then the contradiction would be dissolved.
complex. For, while ofcially we moderns are committed to the notion of our
own mortality, we nevertheless harbor the secret, inarticulable conviction that we
are not mortal. Indeed, as Hans Blumenberg announces in his monumental book,
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, not only does the idea of immortality not disappear,
it is even pushed forward by Lessing, Kant, and Herder to the point of the idea
of reincarnation.12 And in his essay, The Death of Immortality? Claude Lefort
similarly exposes the insistance of the notion of immortality within the modern
period, remarking that after the Bonapartist coup detat in the middle of the last
century . . . the question of immortality [took on] . . . a political import. Astonishing as it may seem to us, in order to be a true republican, a true democrat,
or a true socialist, one either had to deny or afrm a belief in immortality.13 Blumenberg and Lefort both stress that this notion is not a simple hold-out from a
superceded past, the survival in the present of an old religious idea; it is, rather,
a new product of the break from our religious past. But though they concur generally on the need to differentiate the classical from the modern notion of immortality, they are at odds on the question of how the distinction should be made.
According to Leforts account, the classical notion named a kind of
mortal ambition to participate in everlastingness through the accomplishment of
great works or deeds, although the deed itself was not thought to have any chance
of enduring, ultimately. Since every human effort was conceived as time-bound,
none could hope to elevate itself above the temporal ux in order to install itself
within the timeless realm of eternity. Thus, although the deed could win for its
doer some measure of glory or immortality, it could not win eternity, which meant that
it was worth relatively little. The modern notion of immortality benets from the
collapse of our belief in an eternal realm. Where formerly every deed (and the active life, in general) was thought to fail insofar as it was unable to elevate itself out
of time, into eternity, in modernity the deed was reconceived as affording one the
possibility of transcending historical time within time. This is what is new: this idea
that the act could raise itself out of impotence, or out of the immanence of its historical conditions, without raising itself out of time. It is at this point that the
actor work in this specic sensetook on a value it could not have had in the
classical era. The valorization of the act helped to forge, Lefort argues, a new link
between immortality and a sense of posterity (L, 267). The great social revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century may have severed all ties with the past,
but they did so, paradoxically, in order to establish a permanence in time, a durability of human deeds that was not possible previously. The difference arises be-
20 21
chapter 1
cause the sense of posterity now took place across a historical break; what was thus
brought forth was the idea of a conjunction between something that no longer
exists and something that does not yet exist (L, 270).
In the argument presented by Blumenberg, the notion of posterity is not
linked to that of immortality, but instead opposes or replaces it. This argument is
imbedded in a larger one, which states that the attainment of complete knowledge
by any individual has in the modern age been rendered strictly inconceivable.
Within modernity, knowledge is objectied through scientic method, which means
that it ceases to be a matter of individual intuition; that is, methods of objectication
transform the process of acquiring knowledge into one that extends innitely beyond the cognitive compass, and even ambition, of any single enquirer. Along with
this objectication, the sheer speed with which knowledge comes into being is superseded, and discarded as useless, threatens to turn the curious into functionaries of the process of knowledge and to render the possession of knowledge
irredeemably eeting and incomplete. For these reasons, no individual, only a
generational series of them, can become the subject of modern knowledge.
It is in order to clinch this argument that Blumenberg introduces Ludwig Feuerbachs notion of immortality into the discussion. According to Blumenbergs summary, Feuerbach extracted the anthropological core hidden within
our modern notion of immortality, to produce the following denition: immortality extrapolated as the fulllment of theory is the product of the difference . . . between the knowledge drive, which relates to species man, and its
unsatised actual state in the individual man (B, 441)as we will see, this will
form the basis of Freuds understanding of the superego. In other words, once the
rapid and conspicuous progress of modern knowledge makes the individuals
limited share in this progress unbearable, the notion of immortality arises as a way
of healing the wound between the species and the individual, of assuaging the
structural dissatisfaction that emerges from their difference. A kind of error of
prolepsis, immortality negates history in order to posit a spatial beyond where the
future is already waiting to bestow itself on the individual. This error is modern
because its anticipation of reward is based on the perception of the actual, temporal progress of man rather than on the presumed municence of an eternal
being; it is mistaken in that it unjustiably converts some as-yet-unrealized temporal progress into a spatial paradise.
To correct this mystication, Feuerbach argues, man needs to surrender
the notion of immortality and confront the nality of his own death. This will
allow man, unimpeded by otherworldly distractions, to concentrate his energies

into the pursuit of his knowledge drive [Wissenstrieb], which is, for him, a biologized curiosity, through which the interests of the species are imposed on the individual as an obligation, but through which at the same time the individual lays
claim to a counterinterest in his own happiness (B, 444). What this says, in brief,
is that only the species is able to accomplish the destiny of man, and this destiny is
mans happiness on earth. The knowledge drivewhich Feuerbach also calls the
happiness driveaims at happiness by seeking to know not the answers to metaphysical questions, but only those truths that will help satisfy the material needs of
man; it thus places man within the cooperative machinery of the human pursuit
of knowledge without reducing him to a mere cog, since this machine is specically designed for his earthly benet, for the benet of his mortal existence.
While these conclusions are Feuerbachs, one looks in vain in the discussions of Kant and Freud that precede and follow this one in The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age for some word of dissent from Blumenberg. One encounters instead
the dubious implication that there is a continuity among these thinkers on the notion of the knowledge drive. If anything, Feuerbach is shown slightly to improve
on Kant, for the former not only takes over the latters positionthat there are
certain suprasensible ideas which are unsuited to human reason, which we cannot
and should not strive to knowhe also removes the last vestiges of the spatial
metaphor of limits still discernible in Kant. Feuerbach thus allows us to view reasons limits as purely temporal; he teaches us nally that man has no supernatural knowledge drive (B, 442). And though Freuds notion of a knowledge drive
(Wissentreib) is presented as similar to Feuerbachs in many respects, we are warned
that in the study of Leonardo da Vinci, Freud does not pay sufcient attention to
the historical conditions affecting [Leonardos] individual biography (B, 452).
The distortions this continuity thesis precipitates are considerable; I
will cite only the most basic. Kants solution does not, as Blumenberg alleges,
wipe out the tension between self-knowledge and salvation, or the immanent and
transcendent destinies of the subject; quite the reverse. In Kant, the suprasensible is not simply eliminated from the realm of knowledge and thought, as it is in
Feuerbach; it is instead retained as the very condition of thought. That is: no
thought without the suprasensible. As far as the criticism of Freud is concerned,
that he does not dwell excessively on Leonardos historical conditions is indication not of a weakness in his theory, but of its positive contribution. For Freud,
the knowledge drive is bound up with the solution of sublimation, the problem
22 23
chapter 1
being to explain how thought manages to escape compulsion and inhibition, or

to explain how it escapes being a mere symptom of its historical conditions.
So far I have argued that the difference between Lefort and Blumenberg
(or Feuerbach, since on this matter no discernible distance separates the commentator from the author on whom he comments) hinges on the fact that Lefort
links immortality and posterity while Blumenberg opposes them. But there is another crucial difference that affects their respective notions of posterity, which
also turn out to be dissimilar. The conjunction of immortality with posterity, in
Lefort, takes place through a notion of singularity, which is absent in Blumenberg.14 Here is Leforts most concise statement: The sense of immortality proves
to be bound up with the conquest of a place which cannot be taken, which is invulnerable, because it is the place of someone . . . who, by accepting all that is most
singular in his life, refuses to submit to the coordinates of space and time and
who . . . for us . . . is not dead (L, 279).
Someone dies and leaves behind his place, which outlives him and is unllable by anyone else. This idea constructs a specic notion of the social, wherein
it is conceived to consist not only of particular individuals and their relations to
each other, but also as a relation to these unoccupiable places. The social is composed, then, not just of those things that will pass, but also of relations to empty
places that will not. This gives society an existence, a durability, despite the rapid
and relentless alterations modernity institutes. If, with the collapse of eternity,
the modern world is not decimated by historical time, it is because this unoccupiable place, this sense of singularity, somehow knots it together in time. Singularity itself, that which appears most to disperse society, is here posited as essential
rather than antagonistic to a certain modern social bond. Not only this, but another paradox seems to dene this bond; singularity is described both as that
which is localized in space and time (L, 270) and as universal, as that which refuses the coordinates of space and time, which is unsituatable within time.
(Clearly, singularity is distinct from particularity, which is also localized, but which we
commonly and rightly associate with things that fade with time and distance, with
the ephemeral, things that do not endure.)
This notion of singularity, which is tied to the act of a subject, is dened
as modern because it depends on the denigration of any notion of a prior or superior instance that might prescribe or guarantee the act. Soul, eternity, absolute or patriarchal power, all these notions have to be destroyed before an act can be viewed as
unique and as capable of stamping itself with its own necessity. One calls singular
that which, once it has come into being, bears the strange hallmark of something
that must be, and therefore cannot die (L, 279). Signicantly, this notion of singularity, which gives rise to our obscure, one might even say unconscious sense of immortality, is associated by Lefort with the writer, that is, with sublimation.15 For it
is through the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation that we will be able to clarify exactly how singularity is able to gure and not be effaced by the social bond.
However incomplete the notion of sublimation remains at this point, it
is nevertheless clear that it is meant to bridge the gap between singularity and sociality. So, the immediate question becomes: what allows Feuerbach to do without
it? Or: what blocks the emergence of any sense of singularity or temporal immortality in his theory? Recall that Feuerbach entertained (and rightfully rejected)
only a spatial concept of immortality; no temporal version of the notion (whereby
one could conceivably transcend time within time) presented itself to him as it does
to Lefort. Why not? What Feuerbach sets out to do is to eliminate every trace of
transcendence by incarnating the notion of eternity in the nite and forward
movement of time, that is: in progress.Yet, as we have already suggested, the elimination of eternity presents a unique problem for the modern age; it risks the dissolution of society in a temporal vat. Something has to endure, it would seem, for
progress to be conceivable. In fact, Kant made this very argument: [I]nnite
progress is possible . . . only under the presupposition of an innitely enduring
existence . . . of . . . rational being.16 But whereas he offered this argument in
defense of the postulate of the immortality of the soul, commentators have pointed
out that his argument actually requires, if it is to make any sense, an immortal
body.17 Feuerbach tacitly acknowledges the problem, as well as the corporeal requirement for its solution, in his proposed notion of posterity as an innite
succession of bodies seeking happinesswhich nicely avoids the seemingly selfcontradictory notion of an immortal individual body.
The nub of this solution is sheer and continuous succession. None of
the bodies by itself possesses or actualizes immortality in the way the body of the
Monarch was thought to do during the ancien rgime, for example. Succession
alone allows the individual enquirer to be taken up and included within the whole
without limits of humanity, and it alone saves society from the pulverization of
time. This solution also soothes the structural insatisfaction, the unbearable gap,
between the individual, whose share of progress is minuscule, and posterity,
which possesses in abundance the happiness the individual seeks. Finally, this
24 25
chapter 1
solution allows one to argue that the limits of human knowledge are merely temporal and thus capable of being gradually eliminated.
Feuerbach is right to want to snatch life back from eternity in order to insert it
into historical time. The problem is, however, that for him, this insertion means
that life is conceivable only in biological terms, that is, as nite, or as dened by its
temporal limit, death. His description of the relation between the human individual and his or her posterity attempts to offer an alternative to Aristotles description of an animals relation to its species, which relation, Aristotle argues,
renders the animal eternal, a part of ever-recurring life: Nature guarantees to
the species their being forever through recurrence [periodos], but cannot guarantee such being forever to the individual.18 But if his biological denition of human life
nevertheless risks reducing the individual subject to its animal dimension, this
is because it shares too much not with Aristotle, but with a modern and problematic denition of life.
To which conception do we refer and why is it problematic? At the end
of his essay, Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin isolates this conception
when he mentions with disdain the familiar proposition that higher even than
the happiness and justice of existence stands existence itself. Judging this belief
in the sacredness of life itself, that is, in the sacredness of bodily life vulnerable
to injury by [our] fellow men, to be false and ignominious, he speculates that
it is probably of recent origin, the last mistaken attempt of the weakened Western tradition to seek the saint it has lost in cosmological impenetrability.19
In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben follows up on
Benjamins suggestion by tracking the emergence of this dogma, wherein bare life,
or life itself denuded of any political form or protective covering, is deemed sacred. Whereas in classical Greece, bios (a form of life, or way of living, dened within
the political sphere) could be, and systematically was, distinguished from zoe (the
simple fact of life, common to animals, men, and gods), in modern society, he argues, bios and zoe became conated, making bare, biological life the very matter of
modern politics. Agamben thus adopts Foucaults thesis that in the middle of the
nineteenth centuryor, at the threshold of biological modernitynatural life
became the primary concern of the State and, as a result, politics was transformed
into biopolitics. With the development of the life sciences, the old territorial
THE DEATH DRIVE: FREUDS THESIS ON FEUERBACH
State (in which power asserted itself through the possession and control of geographical territory) gave way to the State of population (in which power reigns
less over land than over life itself): the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a societys political strategies.20 It is against
this backdrop that Feuerbachs notion of the biologically based happiness drive
must be understood; it is in this context that its political prole assumes its ominous shape.
If modern political power becomes coextensive or conated with, as was
said a moment ago, the life over which it assumes sovereignty, it does so paradoxically by declaring bare life to be separable from forms of life, that is, from the political sphere wherein the living individual is accorded certain rights and powers.
That is to say, it is only by declaring a (permanent) state of emergency, triggered
by the emergency bare life poses, that modern power is able to suspend its selflimiting laws and assume absolute power over that same denuded (or, now, politically vulnerable) life. But if bare life in this way becomes barely distinguishable
from the political power that invents it as simultaneously excluded from its sphere
and as the very territory over which it reigns, Homo Sacer remains more interested
in exploring the strategies of power than the notion of bare life they construct.
The books references to Foucault are therefore limited to The History of Sexuality and
Dits et crits, where the focus is primarily on these strategies, rather than on the
emergence of the biological denition of human life or, as Foucault puts it, the
conceptual bestialization of man. When Agamben faults Foucault, then, for
failing to demonstrate how political techniques and technologies of the self (by
which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own
identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power)21 converge to produce that form of involuntary servitude which characterizes the
modern subject, we recognize a need to know more about the biological denition of life if we are ever going to be able to explain how modern power is able to
sink its roots so thoroughlyso inexhaustiblyinto bare life. What is it about this
denition of life that allows power to assume such an extensive, even capillary
hold over it?
Though not a response to this question, The Birth of the Clinic, particularly
the chapter Open Up a Few Corpses, in which Foucault ttingly characterizes
biological modernism as a mortalism, might begin to provide an answer. Placing the French physiologist Bichat in the conceptual vanguard of this modernism,
Foucault describes the formers innovation thus:
26 27
The medical gaze of which Foucault speaks throughout The Birth of the Clinic, the
gaze, in Agambens terms, of sovereign power, is an eye that sees death everywhere
immanent in life, sees everywhere this threat to life, and nds in this very ubiquity the excuse for its own insidious and equally ubiquitous control. To the exact
extent that life becomes dened by death, is permeated by death, it becomes permeated by power.
To return to Benjamins formulation, from the nineteenth century on,
bodily life is dened essentially as that which is vulnerable to injury, by processes of disease as well as by our fellow men. To measure the novelty of this notion, Benjamin
asks his readers to reect on the fact that this essential vulnerability, which we now
choose to label sacred, bore in antiquity the mark of guilt, that is, it was a sign of abjection.23 Human life has always been known to be vulnerable to disease and
death, of course, but only in the nineteenth century did this vulnerability become
sacralized, by the discourses of power, as its essential aspect. Agamben, however,
departs from Foucault and Benjamin by seeing this notion of bare life not simply
as a rupture with previous thought but as the culmination of a gradual solidication, throughout history, of the link between nude or bare life and sovereign
power. Thus, when he declares, for example, that Not simple natural life, but life exposed
to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary political element, it is in the midst of a discussion of Roman law, which is in this sense not so different from that of the modern legal-juridical order.24
Politicizing Death, the penultimate chapter of Homo Sacer, opens with
a reference to a 1959 study of what two French neurophysiologists termed coma depass (overcoma), a degree of coma, or of deaths incursion into life, involving a
much greater loss of vital functioning than that which had previously been allowed
to pass for life. The argument of the chapter is that advances in life-support technology have led medical science to redene death by pushing its limits beyond
those set by earlier standards. And as the limits of death are extended, so too are
chapter 1
[I]n trying to circumscribe the special character of the living phenomenon Bichat linked to its specicity the risk of . . . deathof the death
which life, by denition, resists. Bichat relativized the concept of death,
bringing it down from the absolute in which it appeared as an indivisible,
decisive, irrecoverable event: he volatilized it, distributed it throughout
life in the form of separate, partial, progressive deaths, deaths that are so
slow in occurring that they extend even beyond death itself.22
the reaches of sovereign power, which now begins to decide on the fate of a new
class of citizens, the neomorts, or faux vivants, that is, the new living dead, over
which power assumes a unique sort of control. What Agamben asks us to bear witness to is the fact that this recent extension of life beyond the cessation of its vital
functions and the consequent increase of State power were enabled by the emergence of the life sciences in the nineteenth century wherein death was conceived
not as an absolute and unique event, but as a multiple phenomenon, immanent
in life, dispersed through time, and extending beyond death itself. Yet one of
the most original aspects of Agambens argument, as hinted, is the linkage of
the historical account with a metaphysical one. It is, in the end, a certain metaphysical tradition that Agamben wishes to indict for the high crimes of biopolitics
(in his narrative, the Nazi concentration camp comes to replace the city as the
paradigmatic sociopolitical unit of this politics) because, he argues: by the way in
which it isolates its proper elementbare lifebiopolitics reveals its fundamental collusion with the metaphysical tradition. That is to say, he views the positing
of bare life as strictly equivalent to the positing of pure Being insofar as both issue as
responses to the encounter with an unthinkable limit beyond which these elements are then supposed to dwell, indeterminate and impenetrable.25 According to this analysis, a logic of exception has been in place ab urbe condita, positing a
limit and a beyond to the order of political life; this logic eventually provided
support for the notion and construction of the camps. Thus, while divisions may
have ickered momentarily in the classical City, Antigone may once have rebelled
against Creon, these divisions and that rebellion were always placed at risk by the
logic of exception that nourished sovereign power. And now, we no longer know
anything of the classical distinction between zoe and bios, between private life and
political existence, between man as a simple living being at home in the house and
mans political existence in the city.26 Moreover, the current models, by which
the social sciences, sociology, urban studies, and architecture . . . are trying to
conceive and organize the public space of the worlds cities without any clear
awareness that at their very center lies the same bare life . . . that dened the
biopolitics of the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century, are in danger
of simply perpetuating this politics of bare, bodilyor bestiallife.27
In fact, it is almost impossible to imaginenot only for the reader but,
one suspects, for Agamben himself, whose nal pronouncements are irredeemably bleaka model that would not risk perpetuating this politics. Ironically, the
persuasiveness of Homo Sacers analysis adds another hurdle to the already difcult
28 29
chapter 1
task of formulating an alternative. For, by focusing, however productively, on

historical continuities, Agamben is led to downplay the rupture the nineteenthcentury life sciences represented, and it is precisely the notion of rupture, of a
thought or act that would be able to break from its immanent conditions, that is
needed to restore power to life. The most insidious difculty confronting us,
however, is the fact that we ourselves remain dupes of the dogma that death is
imbedded in life; that is, we remain victims of the theme of bodily nitude, or of
bare life, that these sciences cultivate. Alain Badiou, in an interview in Artforum,
makes this important point: The real romantic heritagewhich is still with us
todayis the theme of nitude. The idea that an apprehension of the human
condition occurs primordially in the understanding of its nitude maintains innity at a distance thats both evanescent and sacred. . . . Thats why I think the
only really contemporary requirement for philosophy since Nietzsche is the secularization of innity (my emphasis).28
Stated thus and afxed to Benjamin and Foucaults disparaging analyses
of the modern sanctication of bestial life, this statement strikes one as a long
overdue correction of certain contemporary commonplaces. Yet its judgment will
remain incomprehensible to cultural theorists who continue to misrecognize
bodily nitude as the sobering fact that confounds our Romantic pretensions. For
these theoristsfor whom limits are almost always celebrated, insofar as they are
supposed to restrict the expansionism of political modernism and its notions of
universalism and will (this is only slightly a caricature)the body is the limit, par
excellence, that which puts an end to any claim to transcendence. What Badiou is
here proposing, however, is that our idea of bodily nitude assumes a point of
transcendence. Like Agamben, Badiou argues that death becomes immanentized
in the body only on condition that we presuppose a beyond.
What is needed, in this case, is not an abandonment of current interest
in the body, but a rethinking of it. This rethinking would not have to entail a radical reinvention, for, in truth, another notion of the body has already been proposed, precisely as a challenge to the one offered by the (bare) life sciences. The
notion to which I refer is the one suggested by psychoanalysis, where the body is
conceived not biopolitically as the seat of death but, rather, as the seat of sex.
Contrary to what Foucault has claimed, the sexualization of the body by psychoanalysis does not participate in the regime of biopolitics; it opposes it. Borrowing Badious phrase, one could put it this way: through its denition of the
sexualized body, psychoanalysis provided the world with a secularized notion of
innity. Or: the concept of an immortal individual body, which Kant could not
quite bring himself to articulate, is nally thinkable in Freud.
Yet notoriously, Freuds conclusion, stated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
that the aim of life is deathseems on its face to contradict my assertion. Limited to
this statement alone, Freuds theory would appear to be in harmony with the biotheory of his day, insofar as his theory places the death drive at the very core of life
and its various ambitions. Not inching from this conclusion, even buttressing it
by arguing that for Freud there are no life drives, that all the drives are death
drives, Lacan nevertheless calls into question that simplistic interpretation of the
death drive which perceives it to be nothing more than an explanation for the fact
that a subject often chooses death or unhappiness rather that her own well-being.
Why do people commit suicide or act against their own interests? Because of the
death drive. If this were all there were to it, the drive would not have met Freuds
own standards for conceptual validity. Faced with the proliferation of drives invented to account for almost every denable activity (the drive to collect, the
drive to shop, and so on), a querulous Freud insisted that a concept which did
nothing more than assign a substantialized cause to a specic, known effect, without adding anything new to our knowledge, was empty and useless. Although one
of the effects of the death drive may be the free choice of death, this is by no means
the drives only or even assured result.
The paradoxical Freudian claim that the death drive is a speculative concept designed to help explain why life aims at death, in fact, tells only half the
story; the other half is revealed by a second paradox: the death drive achieves its
satisfaction by not achieving its aim. Moreover, the inhibition that prevents the drive
from achieving its aim is not understood within Freudian theory to be due to an
extrinsic or exterior obstacle, but rather as part of the very activity of the drive itself.
The full paradox of the death drive, then, is this: while the aim (Ziel) of the drive is
death, the proper and positive activity of the drive is to inhibit the attainment of its aim;
the drive, as such, is zielgehemnt, that is, it is inhibited as to its aim, or sublimated,
the satisfaction of the drive through the inhibition of its aim being the very
denition of sublimation. Contrary to the vulgar understanding of it, then, sublimation is not something that happens to the drive under special circumstances;
it is the proper destiny of the drive. This alignment of the drive with sublimation
claries a commonplace misconception about sublimation, namely, that it substitutes a more socially respectable or rened pleasure for a cruder, carnal one.
Lacan summarizes his complex argument about the death drive by referring to it
30 31
chapter 1
several times in the Ethics seminar as a creationist sublimation. Signicantly, in

The Four Fundamental Concepts, in the midst of his discussion of the drive, Lacan quotes
the following Heraclitean fragment, appropriating it for psychoanalysis: To the
bow (Bis) is given the name of life (Bos) and its work is death (SXI:177). The
Greek pun is emphasized in order to place the proper accent on life, as it were
specically, on the form of life. Life may be joined here to death, but not, we will
soon see, in the same way it is in biopolitics.
Historically situated at the very threshold of biological modernity, as a
contemporary of Bichat and the rest, Hegel considered Antigones act from the
point of death. Her deed, he argued, concerns not the living, but the dead, the
individual who, after a long succession of separate disconnected experiences, concentrates himself into a single completed shape, and has raised himself out of the
unrest of the accidents of life into the calm of simple universality (para. 452). That
is, Antigones act may be considered ethical, in Hegels terms, inasmuch as it involves universal being rather than a particular aspect of it, and it concerns universal being inasmuch as it is undertaken on behalf of a dead and therefore completed
being. A problem arises, however, because the universality, or completeness,
brought by death is merely abstract: it is the product of a natural, biological process,
not of a self-conscious subject. Antigones task, then, is to redeem her brother
from this rst, biological death and this abstract universality by consciously performing a second death through her act of burial. She must complete for her
brother the reexive circuit of self-conscious life that he, whose life has been nally shaped by death, can no longer accomplish himself. But what is she able to reect back to him except his own particularity, his own corporeal nitude, now
consecrated by her act, raised to the dignity of universal individuality, which can
only mean here a communally recognized individuality? Polynices is by this forever entombed in his own imperishable individuality, his own imperishable
nitude. In this way bare, bestial life has been dignied, rendered sacred.
For Hegel, the faultthe reason Antigones act is ultimately as compromised as Creons and results in the sacrice of universality for the sake of particularitylies with death. It sunders the journey out from the journey back, divides
the circuit of self-reexivity into mere biological or bodily life (a mere existent,
in his vocabulary), represented by the corpse of Polynices, and a bodiless act,
purged of desire; the body, divorced from the deed, appears, in Hegels discussion, only as dead. And the act is powerless to do anything more than enshrine
corporeal nitude. In Lacans estimation, the fault lies with Hegels ceding too
much, at least at this point, to biological deatheven if the whole of The Phenomenology is structured as a successive series of attempts to master bodily nitude and
death, which has at this historical moment, according to Philippe Ariess massive
study, been newly rendered obscene.29
Lacans interpretation turns on his recognition that the body is, rather,
the site of a different obscenity, a jouissance that opens a new dimension of innity, immortality. Thus will Lacan be led to describe Antigones deed not as a bestowal of imperishable individuality on her brother, but as an immortalization
of the family At. But what does this difference signify in regard to Antigones relation to the dead, to her familial past, or to the city? And what does it signify, to
return to the terms of an earlier discussion, in regard to the relation between the
individual organism, which may be looked at, as Freud put it, as a transitory and
perishable appendage to the quasi-immortal germ plasm bequeathed to him by
his race, and the species?30 Finally, how can our argumentthat Lacan reconnects
body and act, the very terms Hegels analysis sundersbe reconciled with Freuds
contention that sublimation pries the act, whether it be a physical act or the act of
thinking, from the bodys grip?
Let us begin at the most basic level: death, and only death, is the aim of
every drive; this is the Freudian proposition. Where the aim of the sexual instinct
(which is to be found only among animals) is sexual reproduction, the aim of the
drives (which Freud sometimes calls the libidinal drives) is death.31 This means not
only that there is no original life instinct directing the subject outward toward another
of the species for purposes of copulation, but also that there is nothing directing
her toward the outside world for reasons of simple curiosity, as Feuerbach believed, for example. There is no drive impelling the subject toward any sort of fusion with others, toward vital association, which would allow the community of
[subjects to] survive even if individual [subjects] have to die; a notion Freud dismisses as the Eros of the poets and philosophers.32 Freud claims categorically
that there is unquestionably no universal instinct toward higher development; we must, then,
denitively reject the benevolent illusion that there is among men a drive toward perfection or progress (SE 18: 41; my emphasis). Drive pushes away from or
against the stabilization of unities or the dumb progress of developments. But before thoughts of Schopenhauers philosophy (death is the true result and to that
extent the purpose of life) spring to mind and lead us astray, we must recall that
the involuted death drives are described by Freud as working against the teleology
32 33
chapter 1
of a system such as Schopenhauers and as working instead toward winning for the
subject what we can only regard as potential immortality (SE 18: 40). How so?
Directed not outward toward the constituted world, but away from it, the
death drive aims at the past, at a time before the subject found itself where it is now,
imbedded in time and moving toward death. What, if anything, does this backward
trajectory, this ight from the consituted world and biological death, discover? It
will surprise many to learn that Freud does not answer this question negatively by
designating the nothing of death or destruction as the actual terminal point of
drive, but argues instead that drive discovers along its path something positive,
certain necessary forms of thought . . . that time does not change . . . in any
way and [to which] the idea of time cannot be applied (SE 18: 28). Freud rather
surprisingly, but explicitly, quotes Kant in this passage. Why? Is it to bolster the
philosophers thesis regarding the conditions of the possibility of thought, which
are not subject to temporal alteration or decay and cannot be absorbed within the
temporality of thought itself? Not at all. Freud does conceive his notion of drive
as an intervention in Kants philosophy, but the drive does not lend credence to
the Kantian theorem that time and space are necessary forms of thought, not
thinkable in themselves; rather, it signicantly revises that theorem. As we shall
see, the psychoanalytic theory of Freud replaces the transcendental forms with
empty, nonobjectiable objects, the objects of the drive.
The aim of the drive, we have already said it, is deathor, as Freud alternatively puts it: the restoration of an earlier state of things, a state of inanimation or inertia (SE 18: 37). Now, this state exists, according to the theory, only
as a retrospective illusion, never as an actual state; but its purely mythical status
does not prevent it from having had a long history. Platos Timaeus, for example,
depicted centuries earlier a similar inanimate past when the Earth, created as a
globe and containing all things, had no need of sense organs or, indeed, of organs of any kind: [T]here would not have been any use of organs by the help of
which he might receive his food or get rid of what he digested, since there was
nothing that went from him or came into him, for there was nothing besides
him.33 Psychoanalysis rewrites this mythical state as the primordial mother-child
dyad, which supposedly contained all things and every happiness and to which the
subject strives throughout his life to return.
If this were the end of it (and, unfortunately, too many think it is), the
death drive would be a pure will to destruction or a will to nothingness, in
Nietzsches sense of the term. For, since this original state is mythical, the search
for it is vain, and the endless and unsatisable pursuit of it would result in the annihilation of heaven and earth; the death drive would always inevitably end in
death, in suicide and devastation. But this error ignores two essential facts:
(1) that there is no single, complete drive, only partial drives, and thus no realizable
will to destruction; and (2) the second paradox of the drive, which states that the drive
inhibits, as part of its very activity, the achievement of its aim. Some inherent obstaclethe object of the drive simultaneously brakes the drive and breaks it up, curbs
it, thus preventing it from reaching its aim, and divides it into partial drives.
Rather than pursuing the Nothing of annihilating dissatisfaction, the now partial
drives content themselves with these small nothings, these objects that satisfy
them. Lacan gives to them the name objects a; they are, as it were, simulacra of the
lost (maternal) object, or as Freud and Lacan both refer to it, of das Ding. Object a
is, however, the general term, Lacan designates several specic objects: gaze, voice,
breast, phallus. In other words, he gives them the names of bodily organs. Let us clarify why the objects are given these names and how they displace Kants necessary
forms of thought.
The rst thing to note is that Freuds analysis of the subjective constitution of knowledge of reality is concentrated on a genetic account of what takes
place, whereas Kants is more concentrated, at least in the rst two Critiques, on a
description of the conditions of thought.34 It is in part due to his genetic orientation that the mother-child dyad is privileged in Freud from the beginning. In
the 1895 Project for a Scientic Psychology, specically in the section on Remembering
and Judging, this dyad makes an early appearance with the primordial mother
appearing in the form of the Nebenmensch (fellow human-being in Stracheys
translation). This Nebenmensch is described as the rst satisfying object, and the
childs ability to cognize is said to depend on its relationship to her. There is
from the start it seems a structural disturbance of this relation, which is here theorized by Freud as a splitting of the Nebenmensch/mother into two components, of
which one makes an impression by its constant structure and stays together as a
thing [als Ding], while the other can be understood by the activity of memorythat is,
can be traced back to information from [the subjects] own body.35 In his gloss
of this text, Lacan designates the two components of the subjects experience of
the Nebenmensch as (1) das Ding, that part which remains together as a [Fremde, alien]
thing and thus, as Freud says, evades being judged (SE 1:334); and (2) Vorstellungen, ideas or representations through which the Nebenmensch can be cognized or
34 35
chapter 1
remembered. The act of judgment falls then into two parts, as Freud will elaborate more extensively in his essay on Negation, and the sense of reality is said to
be constructed through the specic action of reexperiencing or rending the
rst satisfaction with which the Nebenmensch/mother was synonymous. The various
aspects of the mother, what she was like, will be captured by the Vorstellungen, the system of representations or signiers that form the relatively stable and familiar
world we share in common with our fellow human-beings or neighbors. But
some aspects of the primordial mother cannot be translated into these representations, since they are, Freud says, new and non-comparable to any experience
the child has of itself. A hole thus opens in the system of signiers since those that
would enable us to recall these new and noncomparable or singular aspects of the
mother are simply unavailable, they simply do not exist. The Ding-component is
this alien, untranslatable part of the Nebenmensch, which is thus forever lost to the
subject and constitutes, as Lacan puts it, a rst outside (S VII: 52).
Until this point it is possible to think simply that the maternal Thing is
lost for want of a signier, that is to say, that the fault lies with the signiers. Representation fails, by its very nature, to capture the being of the Thing, which is
thus inaccessible to the former. A Kantian analogy would thus suggest itself: the
Ding-component of the Nebenmensch is to the Vorstellungen-component as the noumenal Thing-in-itself is to the idea we have of it, its phenomenal appearance. This
would make the two components of the Nebenmensch a psychoanalytical endorsement of the philosophical separation of thinking and being: as we gain access to
language and thus thought, we lose our access to that being which is the maternal
Thing. Numerous passages from Freuds texts spring to mind in support of this
thesis, including this famous one from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: At a time
at which the rst beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking
of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object outside the infants own
body in the shape of the mothers breast. It is only later that the instinct loses that
object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the
person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs.36 The child is
able to form an idea of the mother through thought, but it is precisely thought
that forces the child to forfeit its link to the mother.
The radicalization of Freud by Lacan constitutes a refusal to be seduced
by this analogy. At the core of this matter of the unforgettable but forever lost
Thing, we nd not just an impossibility of thought, but a void of Being. The problem is not
simply that I cannot think the primordial mother, but that her loss opens up a
hole in being. Or, it is not that the mother escapes representation or thought, but
that the jouissance that attached me to her has been lost and this loss depletes the
whole of my being. But why continue to insist on the unforgettableness of the
Thing or lost jouissance? If we must not forget this jouissance that stays together
as a whole, it must be because some trace of it remains behind even if the nature
of that trace must be reconceived.
The point is this: Freud did not rest content with the division of the
Nebenmensch into two parts. When there are only two components, as here, there
is not yet any notion of drive. Drive emerges only with the introduction of another term that has far-reaching consequences for the way we perceive the Nebenmensch complex. The term is Vorstellungreprsentanz, or ideational representative in
Stracheys translation. Lacan, attuned to the nuances of Freuds thought, recognizes immediately the implications of this notion, which he denes in the following way: Vorstellungreprsentanz . . . is a matter of that which in the unconscious
system represents, in the form of a sign, representation as a function of apprehending (SVII: 71). Represents representation as a function of apprehending
what? Lacan answers this time, the good that das Ding brings with it, even though
a page earlier he insisted that the primordial loss of das Ding entails a loss of
that Sovereign Good which had once been the goal of classical ethics. There is no
longer any Sovereign Good any more than there is a Being that stays together as
a thing, as a constant structure, or as One. But, surprisingly, Lacan now informs
us that representation, or thought, can apprehend, can by itself grasp hold of
some good. Not some of das Dingthis possibility is foreclosed as the subject nds
itself perched over the void of das Ding, the void of its absencebut some good, something in place of das Ding. Vorstellungreprsentanz, in other words, is not any ordinary
representation (insofar as representation is thought to be what causes the loss of
being as well as the loss of the jouissance of the incestuous relation), but a peculiar kind of representation that permits us to grasp hold of some nonbeing, some
jouissance, or satisfaction.
Lucan will further esh out the implications of the notion of Vorstellungreprsentanz when he says, with explicit reference to the drive, In my opinion, it is
not in this dialectic between [the thing and the thing itself, the phenomenon
and the noumenon] the surface and that which is beyond that things are suspended. . . . I set out from the fact that there is something that establishes a fracture, a bi-partition, a splitting of . . . being(SXI: 106). The old dialectic between
36 37
chapter 1
das Ding and Vorstellungreprsentanz, or the noumenal and phenomenal mother, is disbanded with the development of the concept of drive, because the drive lets us
conceive satisfaction not as always already lost, but as attainable by the subject.
This is where we rejoin the argument we were following in Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
where Freud opposes the object of the drive, Vorstellungreprsentanz, to Kants necessary forms of thought. The ruin of the noumenal beyond and, Lacan adds, the
fracture that is thus installed in the surface order of appearances emerge together
and are somehow related to a new notion of jouissance that is inaccessible to the
subject. This jouissance or satisfaction is represented as an object, such as a breast
or a voice, that has been detached from the mother.
The development of the concept of Vorstellungreprsentanz appears, then, to
sever the Ding-component of the Nebenmensch complex into two parts, into das Ding
and Vorstellungreprsentanz, although das Ding is no longer conceivable as a noumenal
object and is retained only by the description of Vorstellungreprsentanz as partial. It
is clear from the theory that when this partial object arrives on the scene, it
blocks the path to the old conception of das Ding, which is now only a retrospective
illusion. It is similarly clear that when he describes the Vorstellungreprsentanz, or
ideational representative, as a delegate of the body in the psychea delegate,
specically, that betrays its mandatorFreud is actually allowing this ideational
representative to displace and forbid passage back to the naive notion of a body
existing apart from its delegate, which sends the latter forth as its representative.
The traitorous delegate and the partial object act not as evidence of a body or a
Thing existing elsewhere, but as evidence of the fact that the body and satisfaction
have lost the support of the organic body and the noumenal Thing. It is the loss
of these supports that causes the fracturing of the surface order of appearances, a
splitting within being and not between being and its beyond.
The introduction of the term Vorstellungreprsentanz, in other words, coincides with a splitting that opens up in the phenomenal world and the attainment
of some jouissance. What, more specically, is the relation among these terms?
This question provides an opportunity to clear up a lingering misconception.
The moment one says that the aim of the drive is its own satisfaction, or that the
drive has no purpose other than the repetition of its own trajectory, one is tempted
to assert, as an obvious corollary, that the drive is indifferent to external objects.
Virtually any object will serve as well as any other to satisfy the drive, which aims
not at the object but at the satisfaction it can derive from it. Here the object
remains, precisely, external or is incidental to the drive, a mere alibi or prop

serving the end of satisfaction. Although the drive may be obliged to make use of
such an object, this is only so it can get at its real aim, jouissance.
The rst thing to note is that this idea of the drives indifference to an
external object is at odds with Lacans denition of sublimation as the elevation
of an ordinary object to the dignity of the Thing. This formulation is admittedly
confusing; it misleads Lacan himself at points to conate sublimation and idealization. In these instances the ordinary object seems to become the representation of the Thing, of a noumenal beyond, and this has the effect of erecting a
barrier to jouissance, which is now conceived as inaccessible. But there are also
moments when elevation does not seem to entail this function of representation,
but rather entailsin a reversal of the common understanding of sublimation
the substitution of an ordinary object for the Thing. One seeks satisfaction from
an ordinary object instead of waiting vainly for the arrival of the Thing. This is the
only way to comprehend the satisfaction Lacan experiences on seeing a series of
matchboxes, found objects, that were collected by his friend, Jacques Prvert.
What strikes Lacan is the extraordinary dignity of these little cardboard boxes, the
dignity of their thingness.
It would be preposterous, of course, to speak of the dignity of the instincts object, which is unceremoniously gobbled or used up once found. Instinct is satiated by the object, but also extinquished by this very satiety. The
instinct and its object nish each other off, as it were, as the former quickly has
enough of the latter. The drive, on the other hand, does not nish so easily with
its object, but keeps turning around it, just as Prvert continues to collect and
arrange his proliferating series of matchboxes. If the drive is not only satised,
but continues to seek and derive satisfaction in the object, this has no doubt
something to do with the splitting in the order of appearances of which Lacan
speaks. The point is that the drive does not aim beyond the ordinary object at the
satisfaction to be attained on the other or thither side of it. This is what happens
in the case of the oral instinct, where the goal, food, is used to secure the satisfaction of ones hunger. The food is here merely the means by which the stomach gets
lled. If the drive, on the contrary, is said to have no goal, but only an aim, this
is because its object is no longer a means of attaining satisfaction, it is an end in
itself; it is directly satisfying. It is not a means to something other than itself, but
is itself other than itself. The bi-partition takes place within the object, not between the object and the satisfaction that lies beyond it. Lacan puts this another
38 39
chapter 1
way in the Ethics seminar when he proposes that sublimation ought to be thought
not as the substitution of a culturally valorized object for one that is immediately
gratifying sexually, but as a changing of the object itself. The object of the drive is never
identical to itself.37
Since an illustration of this point will no doubt be useful, I would like to
consider the work of Jasper Johns. It is not only a particular workTarget with Plaster Cast, with its anatomical fragments, or partial objects: hand, heel, ear, foot,
penis painted and primly placed in boxes atop a painted canvas targetthat brings
this artist to mind in this context, it is also his enlightening yet matter-of-fact
answers to a series of questions put to him by the critic Leo Steinberg. Steinberg
observes that the commonplace objects that are the subject of Johnss work are
chosen precisely because they are nobodys preference, not even his own.38 For
instance, the clothes hangers that appear in some of his pieces are not ne-crafted
wooden ones such as might have been selected to connote, derisively or admiringly, values of elegance or wealth; nor are they the pastel-colored plastic ones one
might nd in the closet of a teenage girl. They are rather the plain, wire hangers one gets back from the cleaners and to which no one ever really pays much notice. No attitude of anger, irony, or estheticism alters the shape of the objects
Johns paints, rather its the way things are that is the proper subject [of his] art
(31). The American ags for which he is perhaps most famous do not stand for
any specic American values, they are not the ags of a chauvinist or a agburner. Yet Steinberg keeps pressing, trying to nd some preference to explain
Johnss choice of objects. Finally the critic asks for this minimal explanation, Do
you use these letter types [commercial stencils] because you like them or because
thats how the stencils come?to which Johns replies, But thats what I like
about them, that they come that way (32). Bulls-eye! This answer hits its mark
and Steinberg, recognizing this, uses it to summarize Johnss relation to his objects: He so wills what occurs that what comes from without becomes indistinguishable from what he chooses.
There could not be a better description of drive/sublimation: it so wills
what occurs that the object it nds is indistinguishable from the one it chooses. Construction and
discovery, thinking and being, as well as drive and object are soldered together.
The drives creation, ex nihilo, of an object, a thing in the very place where
unied jouissance, das Ding, is absent, is evoked in this description but without
calling up along with it the Romantic image of the artist-creator. On the contrary,
Johns seems to disappear, leaving his objects to stand by themselves, without any
human attitude whatsoever surrounding [them], Steinberg remarks. The objects

stand alone; they do not stand for anything else, reect anything else, not even
Johnss attitude toward them. The will that chooses these objects is absolutely
Johnss and yet absolutely impersonal. Lacan sheds some light on this paradox
when he speaks of the headless subject of the drive. If the ordinary objects of
Johnss work are somehow disturbing, it is not exactly correct to say with Steinberg that they are relieved of mans shadow or that they insinuate our absence.
What they insinuate is the absence of that egoistic self-consciousness which causes
us to bow to external circumstances, to the wills and desiresthe preferencesof
others or to be moved to pity by their pains and sorrows. Johnss work is affectless
only in the sense that it is not passively affected by the objects it paints. But this is
not to say that there is no subject, no will or passion discernible in the work which,
on the contrary, displays a remarkable passion for and satisfaction in the plain object. The affect of jouissance, satisfaction in the object, is not passive; it arouses
itself through the active gift of love. If Johns keeps painting the same objects again
and again, it is because their ability to fascinate him is inexhaustiblenot because
they stand for or represent something more than themselves, but because for him
they are always more than themselves.
THE OBDURATE DESIRE TO ENDURE
Antigone exemplies, we said, that which Freud designates under the term Haftbarkeitor perseverancewith all the ethical connotations the word conjures up. She
steadfastly persists in carrying out her implacable resolve to bury her brother, despite the remonstrations of the pliant and conservative Ismene and the wavering
indecision of her community, that is, the Chorus, which is swayed by the merits
of both sides to the conict, just as Hegel will be. In fact, a signicant difference
between Hegel and Lacan is their respective relations to the Chorus. Whereas
Hegel places himself roughly in their role as moderator, partially swayed by each
side, Lacan regards the chorus more skeptically. Moreover, whereas Hegel focuses
on the merits of Antigones act of installing Polynices as a member of the community . . . which sought to . . . destroy him, Lacan views the act of the loving
sister as a denitive break with her community: because the community refuses
to [bury Polynices, she] is required . . . to maintain that essential being which is
the family At. In other words, the deed Antigone undertakes traces the path of
the criminal drive, away from the possibilities the community prescribes and toward the impossible real. That she is required to do so testies to the Zwang or
40 41
chapter 1
compulsion of drive, which is indifferent to external criteria, such as the good

opinion of others. It will not be for Lacan a matter of setting another place at the
table, of making room for the one brother who was formerly excluded from the
rites of the community, but of destroying that community in the name of what is
impossible in it. This is not to say that the polis of Thebes is founded on the forbidding of certain ideas or actions, on declaring them off-limits. The impossible
is impossible even to conceive under existing conditionshow then could it be
forbidden? Ismenes primary role in the drama is to mirror what is currently possible and to mark the unthinkable nature of her sisters decisive deed; she goes so
far as to express skepticism that Antigone will be able to carry off her outrageous
plan. Informed by her headstrong sister that she would do so, Ismene replies, If
you can do it. But you are in love with the impossible (ll. 104105). And when
Antigone persists, Ismenes skepticism switches to warning, It is better not to
hunt the impossible at all (ll. 107108).
Lacan rejects Anouilhs portrayal of Antigone as a little fascist hellbent
on annihilating everything in her path. What he opposes is not the thesis that her
deed destroys, but that it is conducted out of a pure will to destruction, for such a
characterization overlooks the afrmation and the satisfaction from which her act
derives its unstoppable force. That which Antigone afrms in no uncertain terms
is her love for her brother, which, she insists, must be proclaimed, must be exposed to the light of day. Ismene is willing to go only this far in aiding her sister:
she will remain silent and not tell anyone of Antigones crime. It is this offer that
provokes Antigones greatest ire: I will hate you still worse for silenceshould
you not proclaim it to everyone (ll. 99101). This small exchange goes to the
heart of the matter: the singular truth of Antigones love for her brother must
have a universal destiny, must be openly declared. The proclamation of love occurs in a passage that has struck several critics as so strange as to provoke the wish
that it would one day be found to be an interpolation: If my husband had died,
I could have had another, and a child by another man, if I had lost the rst, but
with my mother and father in Hades below, I could never have another brother
(ll. 908912). This is the sentiment we express when we say of someone, They
broke the mold after they made him. Antigone lets us know that her brother is
unique, irreplaceable. There will never be another like him. His value to her depends on nothing he has done nor on any of his qualities. She refuses to justify
her love for him by giving reasons for it, she calls on no authority, no diety, none
of the laws of the polis to sanction the deed she undertakes on his behalf. She says
only, tautologically, from my point of view, my brother is my brother. Lacan

summarizes her stance this way: Antigone invokes no other right than that one
[this brother is something unique], a right that emerges in the language of the
ineffaceable character of what is [my brother is my brother]. . . . What is, is, and
it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone
is xed (SVII: 279).
Some readers of Lacan may be tempted to turn Antigones stance into a
demand for a certain type of community, one in which the otherness of the
Other would be respected, differences tolerated, a community of singularities,
where by singularity is meant that which cannot make itself public, that which is
in retreat from publicity and thus inaccessible to others. But the argument Lacan
advances does not support such an extrapolation. The point of his reading is not
to insist on the radical, umplummable otherness of the Other, quite the contrary.
The singularity of the brother is not in doubt; it is not his otherness, his inaccessibility that is in question. That Antigone does not give reasons for her love does
not imply that her brother is unfathomable to her but that she is, as even the
Chorus perceives, autonomous. She gives herself her own law and does not seek
validation from any other authority. In other words, it is not the otherness but the
nonexistence of the Other on which Lacans interpretation turns.
Antigones afrmation of love is, I am arguing, similar to Jasper Johnss
afrmative declaration, But thats what I like about them, that they come that
way. Like Antigone, Johns declines to offer reasons for his fascination with targets or American ags or a particular set of commercial stencils; he, too, attests,
in Lacans phrase, to the ineffaceable character of what is. We are invited once
more to taste the tautologism of love, and perhaps now we can say in what it consists, namely, the coincidence, or near coincidence, of the drive with its object.
This is what Lacan sometimes called the illusion of love: one believes the
beloved is everything one could hope for without recognizing the role ones love
for him or her plays in ones satisfaction. Though her love for her brother does
not depend on any of his qualities, Antigone is not indifferent to them; she accepts them all, lovingly. For, love is that which renders what the other is loveable.
This is not to say that Antigone overlooks part of what he is, that she fails to see
that he is a traitor to Thebes or that he has any personal aws. It means she loves
him as he is, the way he comes. This is quite different from saying she loves something ineffable, unfathomable in him. To be sure, the Lacanian phrase I love in
you something more than you, taken alone, lends itself to either interpretation.
42 43
chapter 1
Everything depends on how one interprets the something more. Advocates of

absolute otherness will see it as an inaccessible moreI love your inaccessibility, what I cannot reach in youwhereas Lacan means to say that this something
more is accessed through love. If one were to receive identical gifts or identical
reports of an event one has unfortunately missed both from an acquaintance and
from a beloved friend, one would get more, a surplus satisfaction, from the latter. A gift given by a beloved friend ceases to coincide with itself, it becomes itself
plus the fact that it was given by the friend. The same is true of everything I get
from the beloved, all the qualities, everything he or she is. That is, the is of the
beloved is split, fractured. The beloved is always slightly different from or more
than, herself. It is this more, this extra, that makes the beloved more than just an
ordinary object of my attention.
I spoke above of a near coincidence. The theory of the drive seems to
issue forth in a series of such near coincidences: not only of the drive with its object, but also the drive with sublimation, and the external object with the object a.
It is as if the very function of the drive were this continuous opening up of small
fractures between things. Immediately after noting that Antigones proclamation
of love is expressed in the ineffaceable character of what is, Lacan adds that what
is is ineffaceable in spite of the ood of . . . transformations. Here again the
being, the what is that is the object of the drive is described as ever so slightly
different from itself, as indistinguishable from a ood of transformations. The
singularity of Polynices, what he is, is synonymous with these surface transformations, the ruptures in the order of his appearance. The drive continues to circle
the object because the latter is never identical to itself, is split from itself.
Lacans claim is not that Antigone immortalizes her brother, erecting a
monument to his memory, but that she immortalizes the family At, that point of
madness where the family lineage is undone or overturns itself. Immortalize
does not mean here to preserve in memory, but to continue not to forget that vitalizing fracture that permits one to go mad, to dissolve oneself in a transforming act. One must not confuse the fact that Antigone is unyielding in carrying out
her deed with a rigidity of being. If she is able to undertake such a fundamental
break with the existing laws of her community, this is only because she has rst
been able to unloose herself from the fundamental law of her own being. It is not
only the object of the drive that is split from itself; the subject, too, is fractured
through the drives repetitions. Because the play begins only after the critical
events of her brothers death and Creons cruel edict, some readers have been
persuaded to see her as simply intransigent, unchanging in the very core of her
being. But Antigone is portrayed on the contrary as a gure of radical metamorphosis, whose terrifying transformation we are not permitted to witness but are
required to imagine. For the most part this metamorphosis must be supposed to
have taken place just before the play begins, but some trace of it remains in the
messengers report of the screeching, birdlike cries that Antigone emits on learning that her brothers body has been re-exposed after the rst burial. It is this wild
tearing away from herself, this inhuman rather than heroic metamorphosis that
is the subject of Lacans analysis. For, the ethics of psychoanalysis is concerned not
with the other, as is the case with so much of the contemporary work on ethics, but
rather with the subject, who metamorphoses herself at the moment of encounter
with the real of an unexpected event. Lacans ethical imperative, Do not give way
on your desire, proposes itself as anything but an insistence that one stubbornly
conform to ones own personal history. In short, the ethics of psychoanalysis liates itself with Kants argument that ethical progress has nothing to do with that
form of progress promoted by modern industry, or the service of good, but is
rather a matter of personal conversion, of the subjective necessity of going beyond
oneself.
A perennial accusation against psychoanalysis is that Freuds thesis that
the subject is driven to reproduce an initial state, to recapture or nd again its
rst satisfying object, is determinist. This accusation appears to be conrmed by
the notion of the archetype invented by Freuds disciple, Jung. According to this
notion, we can nd in the psyche of each individual subject some archaic relation, some primitive mode of access of thoughts, some world that is there like
some shade of an ancient world surviving in ours (SXI: 153). But Freud opposes
Jung when he argues in The Ego and the Id that [n]o external vicissitude can be experienced or undergone by the id [or: by the drive] except by way of the ego, which
is the representative of the external world to the id. Nevertheless, its not possible
to speak of direct inheritance in the ego. It is here that a gulf between an actual individual and
the concept of a species becomes evident.39 Freud here takes his distance not only from
Jung, but from the description Aristotle offers of animal instincts obedience to
the species dictates, and from Feuerbachs contention that the happiness drive
inscribes the requirements of the individual subject in the researches carried out
by the species. What is wrong with all three, in Freuds opinion, is that they attempt to eliminate the gap between individual and species in some way. Freud argues that this gap can never be reabsorbed; moreover, it is the very maintenance
44 45
chapter 1
of this gap that permits the individual subject from being annihilated by the history she inherits. That which the individual inherits from her species, her family,
her race cannot be located merely in a stateable law or dictate, but includes also
the At of the law, that excess in the law which cannot be articulated within it. Because the law contains this mad excess where it loses its head, as it were, the subject can carry out the law or carry on the family name without simply repeating in
the present what has already been forseen and dictated by the past. Antigone is not
fated by the crime of her incestuous parents to a similarly tragic crime. The criminal being she safeguards is that of the law itself, which contains its own transgression. If Antigone is fated by her family At, it is in this paradoxical sense: she is
destined to overturn her fate through her act.
Antigones Haftbarkeit, her perseverance to the end or to the momentous
conclusion of an act that will necessarily overturn her, is contrasted to the Fixierarbeit of Creon as conversion, or self-rupture, to modern progress. This contrast
lets us observe the difference between acting in conformity with the real of desire and acting in a self-interested way, or acting to preserve ones own continuity with oneself. The principle of Fixierarbeit is articulated by Lacan as: Carry on
working. Work must go on. . . . As far as desires are concerned, come back later.
Make them wait(S VII: 315). Work here signies something different, something
opposed to the act insofar as work never concludes, it keeps goingor rather waiting. What is it that holds one back from satisfaction? On what is Creon xated?
To answer, one must refer to the concept of inhibition. In Inhibitions,
Symptoms, and Anxiety Freud offers as a memorable example of inhibition the hand of
the obsessional, which is suddenly incapable of performing the simple act of writing. To release his hand and the ow of his thoughts, the obsessional, it is often
said, must rst de-eroticize the process of writing and thinking. This theory has
no doubt contributed to some of the confusion surrounding sublimation, which
is assumed to spring from a separation of thought from sex or jouissance. But our
account of sublimation paints a different picture; sublimation does not separate
thought from sex, but rather from the supposed subject of knowledge, that is,
from the Other. For, the satisfaction of the drive by sublimation testies to the
autonomy of the subject, her independence from the Other, as we have argued.
But if the inhibition of the drive by the achieved aim of its satisfaction bears witness to
our independence, the inhibition of the obsessionals hand, and of Creons xation on the
laws of the State, betray a dependence of jouissance on a supposed subject of
knowledge. This does not mean that enjoyment becomes proscribed, that pleasure
is forbidden by the Other, but that jouissance is now prescribed: Henceforth you
will nd your enjoyment in the following way!
This thesis garners support from something Freud says in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Quoting a phrase from Fausts Mephistopheles, he speaks of a driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the
poets words, ungebndigt immer vorwrts dringt [presses ever forward unsubdued]
(SE 18: 42). This phrase seems to apply to the intransigence of Creon and Antigone, both of whom appear to be, in the technical sense, driven. But Freud then
distinguishes this particular driving factor from that which produces sublimations.
To what does Faustian drivenness owe its unsubduable pressure? This is Freuds
answer: it is the difference in the amount between the pleasure of satisfaction
which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting. The phrasing recalls Feuerbachs damning
critique of a certain modern notion of immortality.
While Antigone is driven by the satisfaction afforded by her love for her
brother, which provides the pressure or tension necessary to act, Creon is driven
by an idealization of the difference between the satisfaction demanded and that
which can be achieved through work. In psychoanalytic terms we would say that
Creon is driven by his superego, which is that psychic agency which fosters in the
subject a distaste for mundane, compromised pleasures and maintains us in a
state of dissatisfaction. Creons xation on the lost object causes him to be relatively indifferent to all others available to him. He remains glued to an ideal he
will never attain, since it is dervied from his nostalgia for something he never possessed. One often hears it said that the superego is an internalization of the laws
and ideals of the culture or community; this simplication misses the fact that the
laws and ideals of the community are themselves fabricated only on the basis of an
idealization of dissatisfaction. If the superego always demands more sacrice,
more work, this is because the ideal it sets in front of the subject is kept aloft by a
loss that the subject is unable to put behind him. The superego attempts to mask
the loss of the Other by posing as witness or reminder of that absolute satisfaction
which can no longer be ours. The stubborn unity of purpose Creon displays is
indistinguishable from the aggressivity he unleashes toward everythingeven his
own egothat falls short of this ideal. This stubborness is thus not inconsistent
with his failure of nerve toward the end of the play, his bending to public opinion. The xation on dissatisfaction, in other words, does not always manifest itself as consistency of character, since it exposes the ego to the vicissitudes of public
46 47
chapter 1
opinion in which it is always possible to nd validation of the superegos harsh

judgment.
The superego thus maintains a rigorous division between that satisfaction available to us and the one that lies beyond. It is possible to argue that there
where Agamben has observed the notion of bare or nude life emerging out of
the metaphysical positing of a realm of pure Being, indeterminant and impenetrable and located beyond an unthinkable limit that separates us from all it
offers, there, too, one can recognize the handiwork of the superego. If, as Lacan
argues, Creon represents a sovereign law that knows no limit, if he seeks the good
of all without limit, this is because his superegoic positing of a pure satisfaction
or absolute goal is founded on the prior positing of an external limit to the world.
This limit decompletes, empties out, all his endeavors, all his satisfactions, causing him to strive fruitlessly toward a goal he will never attain. Creons hounding
of Polynices beyond the limit of death pregures modern sciences hounding of
the subject beyond death, apparently without limit, into innitely extendable
states (in principle, at least) of coma pass. When she covers the exposed body of her
brother, Antigone raises herself out of the conditions of naked existence to which
Creon remains bound.

Copjec Antigone-ImagineThere&#39;SNoWoman 03

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Copjec Antigone-ImagineThere&#39;SNoWoman 03

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

1

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

straightforwardly as a modern drama of ethical action, in the Phenomenology he

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

Now, it would seem that the revolutionary slogan, Freedom or death,

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

IMMORTALITY IN THE MODERN AGE

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

allow man, unimpeded by otherworldly distractions, to concentrate his energies

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

being to explain how thought manages to escape compulsion and inhibition, or

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

THE DEATH DRIVE: FREUDS THESIS ON FEUERBACH

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

task of formulating an alternative. For, by focusing, however productively, on

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

several times in the Ethics seminar as a creationist sublimation. Signicantly, in

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

remains, precisely, external or is incidental to the drive, a mere alibi or prop

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

human attitude whatsoever surrounding [them], Steinberg remarks. The objects

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

compulsion of drive, which is indifferent to external criteria, such as the good

only, tautologically, from my point of view, my brother is my brother. Lacan

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

Everything depends on how one interprets the something more. Advocates of

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

the tomb of perseverance: on antigone

opinion in which it is always possible to nd validation of the superegos harsh

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen

Copjec Antigone-ImagineThere'SNoWoman 03

Copjec Antigone-ImagineThere'SNoWoman 03